Contenu du sommaire : Cultures populaires et cultures savantes dans les Amériques

This paper offers a general survey of culture and arts in Latin-American anarchists movements (end xixth- early xxth c.).

Popular religion is the religion of the people as against the clergy's scholarly religion. In Latin America, Indian religions and the Catholic religion have often mingled in syncretic practices. Popular piety manifests itself in the organised form of worship of pilgrimages. Some Catholics have engaged in a social and political movement of popular defence within liberation theology. The Church passed condemnation of such a use of Marxist thinking and the lure of violent action that it occasionally nursed. Jacques Maritain influenced another political movement, namely Christian democracy the aim of which is to enforce the principles of the Church's social doctrine. In the 1970s, with liberation theology on the ascent, the Church was losing its faithful away to sects and evangelical Christianity. Its answer was to encourage charismatic movements and new communities that restored to the foreground community fervour, the sacred and prayer. Marian worship permits a particularly powerful expression of popular religion. The sanctuary of Our Lady of Guadalupe is an instance of this form of devotion that brings together Latin American peoples and influences their identity.

Kai Kai is an ancient rapanui practice, consisting of giving shape to a spin storyteller ideogram, wich story is told trhough a recitation called « patautau ». Acordding to Ramón Campbell, the practice of kai kai is the oldest tradition of rapa nui culture, which makes it even more meaningful, since it can shed light on how rapa nui imaginary was before western colonization, following Gruzinsky. Untill now, interpretations of kai kai classify it as a game, wich implies -to eurocentric and western eyes- that it would not be any trascendental practice in rapa nui culture, but a mainly childish practice, with the one propouse of amuse. However, this practice endures untill now by oral teaching inside families, study groups and, reacently, in formal education. Is this kai kai classification inocent  ? Or it rather shows a colonizing view of this practice, which puts it in a recognizable place to western eyes  ? We believe it is an interesting task to review existing bibliography about kai kai, and unravel some of colonialist features emerging of this « mere game » classification, unraveling also the permanence or the evolution of this view in those who have studied the practice of kai kai.

The Sopranos is a TV serial which is part of both mass and popular culture in the United States because it lies on clichés that are easily recognizable and understandable by the entire population. The serial plays with the images associated with the Italian-American community (the mafia, men's virility, women's submission, the sacred values of the family) to better revisit them, which enables the audience to identity with the characters. Indeed, The Sopranos does not portray the mafia in the United States but conveys American values (such as the family, loyalty and honor), and, in spite of his affiliation with the mafia and his origins, Tony, the main character, is introduced as a typical head of family from the upper class. Meanwhile, the re-evaluation of the popular representations of the Italian-American community has enabled the TV serial part to shift to high culture.

Rock music is commonly considered as a popular practice, contrasting with more high-brow and learned forms such as classical music or jazz. However, such labeling turns out to be more problematic than illuminating. This paper suggests new interpretative criteria (passive / active, original / commonplace, center / margin, mass / tradition) that may help to shed a new light on these, and other, cultural practices.

The work presented during the HCTI study day (Lorient, November 2007) is part of a larger work dealing with Presidential speeches in Mexico from 1877 to 1976. This subject was developed in detail in my doctoral dissertation at the University of Paris 1-Sorbonne, the full version of which was published by the Institute for Legal Research at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in 1996. In general, what we call the «Presidential message» is in fact a sort of assessment report presented each year by each President in front of the House of Deputies and the Senate gathered in Congress. In reality however, the «Presidential message» itself is only the most political part of this speech, the part which is supposed to address a larger audience. We shall study how these speeches, which also develop the broad political outlines for the year to come, attempt to render more popular certain measures which often run counter to what they seem to advocate, up to the point when the divisions between the expectations aroused by the speeches and the actual facts are such that shocks or social-political re-adjustments will be unavoidable in the future of the PRI as the party in power.

The current work proposes an ethnographic study about the oral tradition of the contemporary quilombo Caiana dos Crioulos of the Paraiba ‘State, in northeastern of Brazil. Libraries and museums in Europe (as well as the Brazilians) have few references about the African-Brazilian culture, which appeared in black communities descended from slaves, and for this reason : this culture is primarily spread by oral tradition. In this context, this research is based on the practice of the coco de roda and the ciranda : two forms of dances and traditional songs. As this culture and its heritage resist or dynamize in front of the current social trends, given the pressures of Brazilian society ? Therefore, there is a cultural essential patrimony, present within the community, so striking that persists over time, after several generations. The worldview and vitality built on a symbolic core of social relations, which allows the community to preserve a collective memory and convey a certain popular tradition, even in the face of economic globalization and advancement of new techniques for diffusion and reinterpretation of the culture.

Henri-Cartier Bresson spends some time in Mexico (the country) in 1934. He is welcomed by famous Mexican photographer Álvarez Bravo who drags him into the urban world of the capital. One can make a link between Bresson's photos. On one of his shots, you can make out throught the half open door of a shop, a pile of coffins.Comparing both artist's pictures gives an idea of an « in and out » between expressionism and surealism.

The purpose of this study is based on the convergence/interference of intermedia aids and in the crossing of different practices and cultures. A common horizon connects these encounters : aesthetics and politics, as opening and relocation of perception that rejects and questions the fixed places of that already given, and turns it all into a potential strategy of social praxis. From this viewpoint, the objective of the research is to depict and analyze the artistic and political implications of net.art produced by the group Iconoclasistas, a “communication and counter-hegemony resources lab” that, with the use of graphic art and research, generates ways of questioning the symbolic and ideological hegemony of discourses and representations that legitimate the naturalized order, by developing and promoting popular resistance strategies by means of creative work that affects symbolism in the Web 2.0, as well as in that of daily life (workshops, community action, demonstrations, creation of group stories, etc.).

This article aims at studying the dynamics of Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine and A Box of Matches, which is based on a lowbrow/highbrow dialectics, and more precisely on a dialectical tension between a lowbrow subject matter and a highbrow narrative. After addressing the nature of “highbrow culture” through Hilary Putnam's concept of “linguistic division of labor”, we try to show that the very idea of “highbrow literature” does not stem from what the author writes about but from how he writes about it. In other words, a highbrow novel can tackle lowbrow themes. Nicholson Baker's novels corroborate this claim: dealing with extremely limited chronotopes (a few minutes during lunch-time or the same time of the day over and over again), they purport to refamiliarize the reader with “the undocumented texture of our daily lives”, with the supra-ordinary world, with everyday – mostly unconscious – gestures and acts, but they do so by means of particularly sophisticated narratives, “highbrow narratives”, requiring a very good literary background and a knowledge of postmodern narrative disruptions (plethoric footnotes, iterative sequences).

The works of Jaime Bayly (born in Lima in 1965) highlight the issue of the genuine nature of literature (associated to academic knowledge), and paraliterature (related to popular culture). After describing the main manifestations of paraliterature as a genre, a definition of paraliterature is given by comparing and contrasting it with the concept of « literarity ». The core aspects of Bayly's work are listed : his resorting to repeated themes, stereotypical characters, the recurring aspect of some of the scenes… The study of the very structure of his writings, the language used, the type of narration all lead to the conclusion that Jaime Baily' s production may belong to to the paraliterary domain. But some aspects come to mitigate this assertion : the literary heritage and context, the political, historical and social reach, as well as an undeniable consistency of the the thematics dealt with and the tight links between the works and their author all come to deny a rather simplistic vision usually attached to paraliterature. Furthermore, the absence of real unity, the evolution that can be noted all along the fifteen works condone the rather inclassifiable aspect of Baily's works, situated somewhere between these two domains whose borders are porous and often subjective : literature and paraliterature.

During the 1930ies, in the wake of unprecedented economic and political challenges, Ecuador undergoes a crisis of cultural identity, which calls the fundamentals of the country's national self-understanding into question. A young generation of intellectuals and artists struggle for an answer to the question what it actually means to be Ecuadorian – the ecuatorianidad – and look for new concepts to reconstruct the cultural fundamentals of the country's national identity. The novel published by Felicísimo Angel Rojas, El éxodo of Yangana, illustrates this quest for identity as it puts popular culture at the core of the ecuatorianidad. However, the author merges stylistic elements of this popular culture with scholarly style, transcending the narration to a universal meaning. The theme of the exodus therefore articulates a twofold popular and erudite dimension, thus contributing to the founding myth of a new Ecuador.

This article proposes an analysis of the short story « The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow » by Gabriel García Márquez (Strange Pilgrims) by looking at the associations the text makes with different forms from popular culture. We will study the short story within the context of Magic Realism, whose framework generally encompasses García Márquez's works, and focus on the various intertextual links with various clichés, from popular culture, fairy tales, and traditional horror stories, to kitsch culture. We will also examine the relationship established by García Márquez with adventure stories, using tropes like contemporary cinema's road-movie. The characters' trip from Spain to France, ending in Paris, calls into question stereotypes about the opposition between « Civilisation » and « Barbarism ». This return voyage to Europe is in fact a sort of postmodern revision of certain American myths – or perhaps, their rediscovery.

In his first novel published in 1948, Ernesto Sábato (1911-2011) explores the human mind and the shadowy part of the existence, which is a bottomless pit the depth of which inevitably brings up the motif of the mirror. In the light of the myth of Narcissus, this article provides the reader with an analysis of the concepts of identity and otherness : if the water mirror underlines a process of specular identification, Ovid's Narcissus tries to reach his true self through illusive reflections and deceptive appearances caused by the distance between the deep ego and the shallow image that is mirrored. In his quest for identity, Juan Pablo Castel (the narrator and main protagonist in The Tunnel) also looks for the essence of his own ego and of his lover's (Maria), driven by his desire to merge or commune spiritually with her ; this quest is carried through by contemplating one of his own paintings, which gives an insight into the conundrum of the unconscious.

Abelardo Bonilla participates to the construction of the national identity of Costa Rica in his novel El Valle nublado, 1944. He opposes high culture, represented by the protagonist, a member of the elite who studied in France, and popular culture that the protagonist is discovering when he is coming back to Costa Rica and decides staying in the countryside. The author elaborates a work of recollection. But the opposition enables to enhance popular culture, endogenous, and the denunciation of the prejudices of the elite about Costa Rican society. The evolution of the protagonist - critical at the beginning and later on admiring as far as the maintenance of traditions in the countryside is concerned- suggests a reflexion to the reader, native or from abroad, in relation with his own prejudices.

Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) is usually perceived as being a “learned” author, as a substantial number of his texts display extraordinary culture and astounding scholarship sometimes in very specialized areas. This culture shows in his essays as well as in his poetical writings but also in his narrative work. However, this is not to say that his literary production is free from popular characters, such as the gaucho of the Pampas or Uruguay, or else the compadrito, a figure symbolical of the outskirts of Buenos Aires. Some short stories are emphatically set in popular surroundings and portray colourful characters. The “oedipal” short stories of the writer are a case in point, combining as they do both sides - the popular and the learned one - to great effect. Set in a “fringe” or border world (the outskirts of the Argentine capital or the border between Uruguay and Brazil), these texts make faithful use of a classical framework which was immortalised by Sophocles and then taken up by Sigmund Freud who was to turn the Oedipus complex into one of the main elements of his psychoanalytic theory.